Web services are becoming more popular for client/server communication. Web services can be located on servers within an enterprise or online (hosted offering) and accessed by clients for a wide variety of operations. Document sharing, search, analysis, reporting, data mining are just a few examples of web services. Web service hosts may support different operations and/or authentication schemes. For example, a hosted server may support Web Service Security (WSS) protocol authentication scheme while an on-premise server may support mutual transport level security (MTLS) with client certificate.
Discovery mechanisms in the web world are disparate and various systems follow different standards. As enterprise clients need to interact with various web services, discovery of the different web services presents a challenge. Use of multiple interfaces may degrade user experience. Moreover, with cloud based services replacing some enterprise based services, a specific service may either be in the cloud or in the enterprise network. In such scenarios, the client may have to choose which service is be used.